Hotel nights down 14% last year

The EU had one of its worst tourism years in 2009 and Malta was no exception, according to statistics published by Eurostat yesterday.

The number of total bed nights that non-residents spent in hotels in the 27 EU states dropped by more than nine per cent on average when compared to the previous year.

Malta performed even worse than the average, registering a drop of 14.1 per cent.

On the other hand, the number of Maltese spending time at hotels rose by 5.9 per cent over 2008 and amounted to 400,000 bed nights in 2009.

Other Mediterranean member states which compete directly with Malta's tourism industry performed just as badly.

Cyprus, which normally offers a package of sun, sea and sand, attracting many British tourists, saw its hotel bed nights slashed by almost 22 per cent in 2009. Greece too suffered a major downturn with its figures declining more than 11 per cent, while Portugal registered a fall of 11.8 per cent.

On a general EU level, Eurostat said the number of nights spent in hotels in 2009 both by residents and non-residents fell in all member states, except Sweden (up by 0.1 per cent).

The largest decreases were recorded in Latvia (-23.3 per cent), Lithuania (-20.4 per cent), Cyprus (-19.7 per cent) and Slovakia (-18.1 per cent), and the smallest in Germany (-1.4 per cent), the UK (-1.7 per cent), Slovenia (-2.1 per cent) and Austria (-2.9 per cent).

Malta's hotels are the most dependent on tourists (non-residents) in the EU as other member states depend heavily on internal tourism.

While in 2009, 96 per cent of all guests at Maltese hotels were non-residents, the average in the other member states stood at just 56 per cent.